Nicholas Sillwell and the team at his company, Stormboard, designed a material made from waste collected from the Po. In doing so, they built shelters for the less fortunate.
More than an engineer, Nicholas Sillwell describes himself as an imagineer — a creative engineer. He is the inventor of the panels that make up the first refugee shelter built from recycled plastic sourced from floating waste collected from the River Po, gathered through the Po d'Amare initiative and presented on 8 November last at Ecomondo. The modular, adaptable housing units will be used for a refugee camp in Greece, and are the result of an agreement between several Italian and international partners.
The main players in the project are the Italian consortium for plastic packaging recovery Corepla, the Belgian association Waste Free Oceans (WFO), which has long been working on the recovery of marine litter, and the Stormboard facility of the British company Protomax, which specialises in the production of recycled plastic panels and of which Sillwell is manager.
The initiative has the collaboration of Fondazione per lo Sviluppo Sostenibile, Castalia — a fleet operator involved in monitoring the marine environment and collecting floating waste — and the Po River Basin District Authority, with the patronage of the Municipality of Ferrara and Aipo, the Interregional Agency for the River Po.
We met Nicholas at the fair and asked him to tell us a little more about his project.
What was Stormboard's role?
We at Stormboard designed the process for making these panels from mixed plastic. It resembles plywood, but it's better because it doesn't burn and can be reused.
What types of waste are the panels made from?
The biggest problems arise with mixed plastic — that is, different types of plastic contaminated with other waste. We developed the process that makes it possible to use the entire mix. For example, we also used coffee pods, which are a very common type of waste, and melted them into the compound. We used a proportion of plastics from the Po and a proportion of packaging from Corepla's land-based collection. Plastic is unfortunately here, and we have to do something with it.
How much waste does it take to build one shelter?
One shelter is the result of processing an amount of waste equivalent to 30,000 plastic bags containing bottles, caps, but also paper… These are 17-square-metre modules: sturdy, safe and sustainable. They are a good solution, because where these shelters are going there is no wood, no concrete, no metal — there is only a great deal of waste. With this process, waste can be used as a raw material, suitably reprocessed to produce modular homes, but also chairs, tables and objects.
We have developed the technology; it is then up to designers to think about the rest.
